Team 2056 receives Excellence in Engineering award at 2010 FIRST World Championship April 20, 2010
Students from fifteen Canadian high schools and six elementary schools took part in the FIRST Robotics Competition world championship held on April 15 - 17 at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, Georgia. At the event, more than 500 teams from 30 countries competed in three levels of FIRST competition: FIRST LEGO League, FIRST Tech Challenge and FIRST Robotics Competition. Canadian teams fared very well in the championship.
Teams from eleven Ontario and two Quebec high schools took part in the flagship FIRST Robotics Competition for high school students. Teams from St. Catharines, Ontario and Stoney Creek, Ontario were respectively the team captain and a member of the winning alliance in their respective divisions. They thus moved on to the championship finals. Teams from Toronto and North Bay, Ontario also participated in their divisional finals. The team from St Catharines and their alliance partners made it to the final round of the championship, thus ending the competition as silver medalists. The prestigious Excellence in Engineering Award, sponsored by Delphi Automotive, was awarded to the team from Stoney Creek. Another prestigious award, the Gracious Professionalism award, sponsored by Johnson & Johnson, was awarded to the team from North Bay. In addition, Ian Graham, a member of the team from Sault Ste Marie, Ontario was one of ten recipients of the Dean's List award, recognizing exceptional individual student accomplishment. This award was presented in front of the U. S. Secretary for Education, Arne Duncan.
Given the high caliber of competition, the number of teams participating in the championship (344) and the limited number of judged awards available at the championship level, these were excellent results.
Participating teams had six weeks to design and build a robot to compete in this year's event, which featured a soccer-like game, "Breakaway", in which robots had to climb obstacles as well as score goals. Robots competed not as individual teams, but as part of alliances with other schools' teams. In addition to competing in "Breakaway", teams vied for judged awards which recognize significant accomplishment by individual teams.
All participating teams had earned the right to compete in Atlanta due to their results in regional competitions held earlier this year, including two such competitions held in Canada, one at the Hershey Centre in Mississauga and one at the University of Waterloo. Earning the right to participate in the championship event in Atlanta is a significant accomplishment in itself.
Two teams from British Columbia took part in the FIRST Tech Challenge. Competing against a field of 100 teams, the "Roberts Creek Xtreme Robotic Minds" team from British Columbia received the PTC design award and was a runner up for the Rockwell Collins Innovate award.
Six teams from across Canada participated in the FIRST Lego League World Festival. This event is for children aged 9-14 and uses Lego's "Mindstorms NXT" robot platform. This year's challenge, "Smart Move," focused on applying robotics and research to some of today's transportation safety and efficiency problems. 84 teams in all took part, including teams from Brazil, China, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the Unites States. While all six teams from Canada did very well, special recognition goes to "Les D'ebrouillards" from Nova Scotia whose team won a Judges'Award.
